I’m growing weary of reading information created by the entire marketing consulting world. From self-pronounced social media experts, to agencies, to marketing vendors who blog, to the hundreds of marketing newsletters offering ‘5 ways to energize your online, social media marketing, personal branding spend, strategy ROI’, to mainstream magazines. It’s becoming overload. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to find and follow more pundits. What I find myself searching for are people like me.

I want to find some people who attend conferences, not speak at them. People who read books, not write them. People who are building interactive marketing strategy for their company, not giving advice to others. This is an open call to all internal marketers to connect with me. Why? I just want to read your tweets and your blogs as you build your strategy. I just haven’t found you very easily on the social networks - especially Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. But, I haven’t really been looking that hard either. All of the consultants flood the airwaves with their self-promotion so you haven’t been served to me on an over-tweeted platter.

So, today I started with a simple Google on ‘CMO Blogs’. I found this article from 2006 (*now that’s old news*) by Mario Sundar on Top 10 CMO Blogs. So now I follow Mario - the online Community manager at LinkedIn who writes an excellent blog. This led me to Eric Kintz who blogs about his work as a marketer at HP. He also wrote an informative post on why blogging as a marketer matters. That led me to dig into the work of David Churbuck, who blogs about his marketing efforts at Lenovo. He kindly outlined his thought process into his online strategy for the Lenovo 2008 Olympics sponsorship. He built a bold athlete 2.0 strategy that has value at its core, rather than overt company sponsorship.

Well, that’s my web wandering for the day. If you are out there, I’d love to connect with you, oh Internal Marketer. Here’s my criteria for the best connections.

Scott Allen guest blogged at Six Degrees from Dave the other day about 15 Creative Ways Recruiters Can Use Professional Networking Sites.

The way I see it, any hack can figure out how to type a few keywords and do a search — where it gets really interesting is in all the other things you can use the tools for to grow your business, attract more candidates and differentiate yourself from the thousands of other recruiters out there.

I’m happy that someone is turning the conversation about social networking away from “Does it have better candidates than Monster?” discussions, and its close cousin “How can I use Social networks as background checks?”. I tried 3 years ago to articulate what recruiting would be like when online professional networks became commonplace. I wasn’t smart enough at the time to predict exactly how Linkedin, Facebook, etc could change the dynamic within the recruiting process.

Unfortunately, the media messages and recruitment industry discussion of social networking sites often support these simple questions.

• Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting
• New goldmines of candidates are popping up on the Web
• Get Dirt on Candidates: The Use of Social Networking Sites to Pre-Screen

I’m interested in the use of social networking to provide maximum value to candidates. Along those lines, I support the following:

1. Recruiter profiles should be detailed and specific. The ‘mystery recruiter’ will be increasingly unable to compete against those who have made public their professional and personal credentials. Within the first 5 seconds of any recruiter call, you have already been Googled. If you’ve been hiding from Social Networks, you’ll get the big **click**.
2. Recruiters should prep candidates. Scott points out that you can send your candidates the profiles of hiring managers. Amen to that. If hiring managers want to know so much about candidates, the least they can do is let them peak into their backgrounds
3. Recruiters should friend candidates when the time is right. Having a Friending protocol to determine when they should invite candidates to connect will be important. I personally think that right time is after an in-person interview, or a second phone screen. Of course open networkers think differently. Whatever the case, an invitation to a recruiter’s personal network after some rapport has been built is a nice way to say I value you.
4. Recruiters should spread at least a little knowledge. Candidates should become incrementally smarter as a result of their relationship with a recruiter. A simple way to do this is for recruiters to share what they are learning about with candidates. They can use Del.icio.us or other social bookmarking tools instead of Internet Explorer favorites to save each everything they are reading about their industry. Then they can invite candidates to follow their feed. It’s not a blog, or actively maintained Facebook presence (which is far more time consuming) but at least candidates are deriving value from being connected online.

The time is definitely right to move recruitment away from using online social networks as purely another resume database, or sourcing engine. It is a game changer in bringing networking relationships to the forefront of people’s professional life.

So, cool story of how I networked with LinkedIn to someone who went to my same college (UB) with the same undergrad degree (Communication Design) and followed a similar path as I did to usability away from pure Graphic Design. Well, she has a consulting firm now called Sylver Consulting and I helped bring her in to Hudson to help us research our intranet usage. Well after Brianna Sylver and my team visited Pittsburgh to do our research she revealed the good news that she had an article published in BusinessWeek online. It’s an excellent piece addressing the meaning of innovation in the lexicon of different companies.

She rightfully points out that the term is so overused within corporate culture that you need to do research just to understand what that word means at a company before developing anything truly innovative. Speaking as someone who has “bring innovative marketing solutions to the business” on his personal objectives, there’s a lot to be said for simply understanding the meaning of the word in my company.

I have a lot of respect for Dave Lefkow. We worked together at TMP, and we both made the jump to another company at about the same time. I went to Hudson Highland Group - a staffing firm to work on recruitment marketing for one company. He went to Jobster to work on building a whole new type of recruitment marketing for many companies. He also writes articles for the ERE. I like his latest piece; a well-researched article on the talent behind the iPod.

Hey you know what, blogging is fun. I haven’t done this since May. I always suffer from a “who the hell reads this”, “I’m bored, but I’d rather read Yahoo news than blog”, “What’s the point?” mentality. And I suppose so many people out there go through the same thing. By and large it IS pointless. Especially for a married man that now works from home, puts in his time, and enjoys poking around with his kids for 90% of his daily entertainment. What do I have to say? My brain is burnt on work. For someone who never so much as wrote in a journal for more than 3 straight days in his life. For someone who latches on to VERY random interests at any given point, my blog is pointless. One day I’m interested in the Buffalo Bills, the next - in bowhunting. But, come to find out, there is some intrinsic value to this babbling.

My friend that I haven’t talked to in a while was able to find out what’s up, just by Googling me.

Dana Deskiewicz is doing really well in his budding Creative Director career and took the time to give me a shout out, cause of one little blog post of only 6 that I have accomplished this year. Well done man!

Last night about 20 Designers from around Chicago met for the inaugural Chicago UX Special Interest Group meeting. Larry Marine from Intuitive Design and Research facilitated the session. A brave soul put up the site that she is in charge of redesigning and let the rest of us analyze it, hash it, and rehash it. It was certainly good to get back into the Chicago community of designers anfter an extended hiatus (having another kid will do that).

Hopefully the next gathering will allow for a bit more networking, because all I walked away with was the facilitator’s name.

I’ve been researching Social Software for a few weeks now, first hearing about it via an invite to Friendster. I’m intrigued because the whole “revolution” is based on a concept that flamed out personally for me 3 years ago. At the height of the dotcom boom I was the lead UI designer for an internet startup named “Who2Trust”. Our model was to build a directory of recommended service businesses (doctors, dentists, financial planners) through people you trust. We had the whole 6 degree of separation thing. We wanted to make money from businesses buying profiles, just like they buy Yellow Page ads. Our competitors included iThought.com, Servicelane.com, and others. We failed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was motivating people to make connections and recommend businesses for the shear joy of it. Anyways, it’s very interesting to read a designer’s view of his own little startup from 1999 called epinions.com. In Peter Merholz’s view epinions is the Social Software website that’s got it all.

I wrote a few epinions and certainly got into the pay per review earnings model. It was cool to see how many people read and liked my reviews. And there certainly was some competition to get more friends into my web of trust and keep doing better and better reviews to make more money. The thing is that the affinity is very loose. I knew none of the people in my web personally, and I don’t feel bad for having left the site unused for 3 years. My point is that I don’t put too much stock in Social Networking as a primary means of maintaining relationships unless I’m getting relevant information. I think that the social networking caused by interlinked blogs has some potential to get me there. Is there a way to have an RSS feed with 6 degrees of separation from the friends list in my blog?

I just have networking so on my mind. The Chicago UPA meeting last night was interesting. I walked into a crowd of Usability people and learned about the history of the UPA, of which we are starting a Chicago Chapter. I might event join the organization.

I’m struck by networking right now both from a personal quest, and because we’re working on a project at TMP that is closely related. I’m not a networker. I don’t know how to “work a crowd” in a professional/meaningful way. I walk into a room of strangers - of people whose sole interest similar to mine is what we do for a living. I figured I’d be the guy who would go and just sit in a chair and eat the sucky finger food that was to serve as my dinner.

But, something happened. “Jerry” from GM Locomotive came up to me and started a chat on usability in trains. So, now I know a train guy. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw Brain Joosse from Technotribe. I knew Brian because a coworker referred me to him after my dotcom bombed. Brian interviewed me to freelance with his little virtual multimedia - web company. Come to find out he is living the dream of working from home in a virtual company. I could have talked to him for a few hours. But this is the essence of networking. I don’t even need to read a book that I’ve been meaning to get to written by a client of our dotbomb.

And isn’t a blog a great form of networking? Uh, yeah. In a totally non-threatening way, you can read someone’s history of thought, and who they know, and what they like, and what they link to. Anyone of these things can spark a connection with someone much more naturally than any message board, or even real personal contact. Personal contact is flawed in that you can’t review someone’s history based on what they are talking about at the moment. Think of how many Starbuck clerks would actually offer a mutually beneficial relationship, if only you knew that once they had lived in Western New York, and rooted for the Bills. Read others’ blogs. It’s Blogworking baby!

I’m heading to the inaugural meeting of the Chicago UPA tonight. I’m all for making websites usable, and networking with other Usabiligeeks. I’m thinking there probably won’t be much learning going on. More like “What do we want to name the group?” Oh well. Everything starts small.